Newsification

I can’t put my finger on the moment we graduated from people
into walking news-pieces,
flying past each other,
headlines waiting to be forgotten,
headlines written with disappearing ink,
their timer already set to zero.

Sometimes a face sticks in your head
like the pictures in a tabloid.
Never mind though,
the story will soon be drowned in floods renewed daily.
Every face will be pushed
further down a stack with no limits.

Everyone’s a journalist here,
it’s not too hard.
Because the newsreel can’t stop,
and space can’t be left empty.
So we,
open source journalists,
log snapshots of our lives,
snapshots taken so frequently
you could create a movie if you flicked them together,
a movie longer than the recorded subject.
Click a selfie,
make a velfie,
go live on Facebook,
give connections a backstage pass to your life.
Check in at the movies,
and at the tennis court
while you swing the racket
with your weaker hand,
for the stronger one’s holding the smartphone.
Memory is a spike,
so keep churning the headlines,
keep posting,
uploading,
updating,
so posterity will know who you were,
who cares about what you did.

Under the shadows of these documented lives,
between all these bookmarked pages,
when the camera is away,
when we aren’t acting our impersonated realities,
we might create moments
worth remembering.

We just might.
If we leave some space.

NaPoWriMo 2017, Poem 11

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